Opinion / It’s vital your people are on board with the tech revolution

Jessica Worden, Head of Coffee at GAIL’s Bakery

---

When asked if he still believed in the limitless potential of technology, Steve Jobs answered, “Yes. But it’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people”.

Most in the hospitality industry are clear on the huge opportunities that technology presents. Yet the technology space is very complex, with myriad businesses offering different services and applications to solve a range of operational challenges.

Making systems deliver what they promise is challenging and it is crucial for operators to find the right technology while ensuring it truly serves all stakeholders. The first step to achieving this is understanding your business’s needs, its people and customers.

GAIL’s Bakery opened with a vision of bringing delicious, well-crafted sourdough bread back to the high street. This vision evolved to building and scaling an approach to specialty coffee that honoured our origins in craft baking. Today, we have over 130 bakeries and remain a craft-focused business. We love being hands on, we love making and doing things. This desire to make and serve our communities is central to our values as is our desire to grow and develop craftsmanship within our baristas.

So, how do we make technology work for us? When it comes to harnessing the many digital tools available, shaping mindsets is crucial because many people perceive technology as in opposition to their craft. How do you evolve hand-crafted to well-crafted, evoking the intention while elevating the consistency of your range?

While craft is often manual, it is the knowledge and expertise behind the labour that enables craftspeople to create. Operators introducing technology should consider these tools in terms of how they enhance and facilitate the development of people’s skill sets – because people are critical to operational success.

When introducing change, it’s vital to build awareness of how technology can add value without taking away from roles. Eight years ago, we trialled and launched PUQpress in our business. We started from a desire to improve both our efficiency and quality as well as mitigate the risks associated with hand-tamping.

Businesses often introduce automation to reduce long-term labour and training costs. For us, it was about finding a solution that would help us meet the demand at scale. However, we initially struggled to land on the right message because of our own investment in defining craft in terms of hand-crafted. We weren’t trying to reduce training nor did we want to optimise processes at the expense of teams.
 

“It’s vital to build awareness of how technology can add value without taking away from roles”

Baristas were concerned about the impact of auto-tamping on their role. Rather than seeing an opportunity to make their job easier and deliver more consistent results, many saw the technology being introduced at the expense of their identity. It seems funny to reflect on now, with the adoption of PUQpress as an industry standard that elevates coffee quality, but at the time there was a lot of resistance and fear.

That really brought home the idea that getting people to understand what technology can deliver for them and how it can marry with their identity is fundamental to its adoption and successful implementation.

If a user doesn’t understand or believe in the technology, whether that’s artificial intelligence (AI) or super automation, they won’t engage with it effectively. So, how can operators find ways of funnelling data points from multiple sources down to the most important people so that they understand what their key actions are?

One of the areas where we’ve seen the most opportunity is with equipment, such as Easycream steam wands and digitally connected espresso machines. Both enable our teams to produce consistent results and the depth of data captured, such as predictive features around maintenance, is incredible. This means we can measure and track data to consistently feed back to our teams when things are going well or when improvements are needed.

What’s been most fascinating is seeing our people – our baristas and wider bakery teams – engaging positively with these tools. We’ve set standards and parameters on how to work with the technology, but it’s our teams who have identified new ways to use it. For us, it’s been about creating a feedback loop through people – not just through data insights.

From insights to excellence

For GAIL’s, enabling excellence while scaling the business has been a process of evolving simple systems over time. Our quality control programme started with a sheet of paper, which was a very hands-on process reliant on individuals disseminating feedback on service quality – but it was not built for scalability.

We then moved to a combination of auditing and quality control programmes that automated data capture and produced reports. We started with building the right habits in our teams to carry out basic yet essential checks through apps like TRAIL, to start bringing our people on a journey. To understand how integral they were in supporting our mission to become better through growth and scale quality.

We’re now at a point where rather than having a top-down approach, our people are monitoring and implementing quality control – a process that has slowly evolved to enable GAIL’s Bakery to become better as we grow. These habits build into the right mindsets, ones where our baristas understand the value of the data our systems produce and consequently create better data.

This leads to powerful reporting that supports insights into how we can continue our journey, further develop the expertise of our team and elevate the customer experience. However, unless the people interacting with these tools understand what insights the business is seeking and how it can assist their role, it becomes nearly impossible to make data-driven decisions.

The digital future together

Today’s hospitality industry faces growing challenges around attracting and retaining talent. Technology provides a huge opportunity for operators to set their people up for success, but only if the benefits it can bring to their role are truly understood.

We live in a world where there is constant friction between the seamless technology embedded into our daily lives and mistrust when these tools don’t always live up to their promise. That’s why it’s essential for hospitality leaders to foster a strong and positive relationship between their people and the digital world.

Hospitality is a magical arena driven by the desire to interact with people. Helping our people understand the benefits of technology –and that it doesn’t need to take away from their craft – is vital for successful implementation and ultimately scaling quality. 
 

This article was first published in Issue 20 of 5THWAVE magazine.

Subscribe to 5THWAVE to receive each edition in print and digitally or sign up to our newsletter and be the first to read the latest articles and updates on World Coffee Portal research.